I found an issue compiling openFOAM (both -2.x.x and -ext version) on a Debian-testing 64 bit system.
Some application (setSet for instance) were not correctly compiled because the "liblncurses5-dev" package was missing.
If anyone experiences the same problem installing "liblncurses5-dev" from Debian repository should fix if.

The package you mention is very likely one that also installs one of the packages above. Additionally, it's also possible that in the testing section of Debian there is a broken dependency which is only fixed by installing the package you've stated.

You should be able to ascertain if the packages I mentioned are installed or not in your system:

As You can see the GNU linker (ld) cannot find the lncurses. This was fixed installing the package "libncurses5-dev". I am pretty sure of this, I just double-checked on another Debian system.
Moreover the Debian-testing I'm using is the newest available and it is updated almost every day.

The list of packages You reported from http://www.openfoam.org/download/source.php is secifically designed to work for Ubuntu systems. I know that Ubuntu is based on Debian, nevertheless the dependency tree may be slightly different.
I guess, but I'm not sure that libncurses5-dev may be installed as a dependecy for one of the package You listed under Ubuntu.

Mmm... interesting... I've checked the dependency list and it seems that libreadline5 doesn't need libncurses, but libreadline6 (default for Ubuntu 11.10 when using libreadline) does need libncurses5 and is installed by default along with libreadline6.